The Suburbs: Middle-Aged Myth

The city, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, reeks of opulence:
a two-car family might as well be on relief. But the shape of the place
and the nature of its glamour have changed since the golden years, when
Hollywood's pioneer stars came to the five-square-mile tract of
beanfields, carved castles out of the surrounding canyons, and turned a
wasteland into myth, when

Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford built their fabled 14-acre
"Pickfair" and proposed that the community be walled off from the...